They circled. Sweat slicked Eliza's palms. The ground's damp gave a little underfoot and then held. Vharan lunged, a clean line of force, and Eliza pivoted inside his swing—close enough to smell the salt on his skin, to feel the vibrant life of him—and placed the tip of her blade under his chin. The pressure tilted his head back a fraction, enough to claim the space between breath and blood without taking it.
Silence folded around the ring. Vharan’s eyes flicked to hers. He was not afraid. He was… chastened. Surprised, then thoughtful.Soft hands,she thought with quiet satisfaction,are not the opposite of sharp minds.
From the edge of the clearing, Rakhal watched. He hadn’t moved since the bout began, a dark weight against the tree line. The orcs knew he was there; the air seemed to shape itself around his silence. No one spoke louder than they needed to. Even the young learned quickly what kind of quiet belonged to him. He didn’t interfere. He didn’t need to. His presence alone was enough to remind them that this contest—her place among them—existed because he allowed it. When her blade found its mark, something in his stance shifted, almost imperceptibly, like a man reining himself in from instinct. She felt it more than saw it, a quiet current of possessive heat threading the space between them.
She stepped back and lowered the knife. Only then did she hold out her free hand.
"Again," she said, "when you're ready."
Vharan stared at her offered palm a moment too long to be comfortable, then took it and squeezed once, hard. He nodded. "Not soft," he said gruffly, and seemed to mean it both as aconcession and as a promise not to make the same mistake twice.
Shazi clapped once, the sharp sound like a sparrow's wing. "Good," she said to no one in particular and everyone at once. "Again at dusk for those who want to keep their ribs unscored."
The circle broke apart. Someone—one of the older women whose braid was weighted with bits of metal—offered Eliza a waterskin. Eliza drank, handed it back with thanks. The woman tipped her head in acknowledgment and moved away.
As midday approached and the mist dissolved, they ventured deeper to set snares. Shazi took Eliza and two others—Rokh, scarred down his cheek, and Tamir, silent as fog—along a fern-choked run where the ground poured itself between roots like water. Eliza tied her cloak close and took the cord Shazi handed her.
"Three hands above the run," Shazi said. "No scent on the loop. We check them when the fog falls again."
Eliza nodded and knelt, testing the slipknot. The forest spoke in hidden rustles and held breath. She tied the snare as she had on the northern plains, where hunger taught cleverness beneath snow. She masked the loop with fern leaves without crushing them—crushed leaves told stories. Shazi watched without correcting. Rokh watched and hid his interest poorly. Tamir watched nothing and everything.
They moved along the run, placing a second trap near a gap in the roots. "Here," Eliza said, and showed them how to fashion a scent-blind mask with mud and powdered charcoal. "We used this in Maroth when the hares went to ground. The wind takes everything that betrays you."
Rokh grunted. Shazi's brows lifted, then smoothed. Tamir's mouth almost moved.
Two hares before midday. The second one snapped the loop and thrashed, a small, fierce beating of life against cord.Eliza moved in and made it quick, a clean turn of the wrist, a soft apology in her throat because she had always believed in speaking to dying things even when she knew it changed nothing.
By the time they returned to the clearing, the camp's watch had shifted again, and the fire burned hotter. Eliza skinned the hares with a working woman's economy, fingers steady, blade small and sharp. Blood darkened the moss. She salted the meat and set it to hang where the smoke would sweeten it.
Someone called her "knife-queen," not unkindly; the nickname drew a ripple of quiet amusement. Shazi's left tusk flashed in the briefest of smiles. Vharan came near enough to see without seeming to look. Eliza didn't correct the name—from derision it would have stung, from this, it felt like a test passed and folded away.
When the sun tilted and the light thickened to honey and smoke, Shazi tossed Eliza a strip of dried meat and sat beside her on a fallen log. She held her own blade in one hand and a whetstone in the other, long strokes laying the edge bare to the last atom. The sound was a slow, clean rasp.
"You fight like him," Shazi said after a while.
Eliza turned the phrase over, let it rest. "Like Rakhal?"
Shazi shook her head, eyes on the knife. "No. He fights like a storm the ground decided to wear. You fight…" She considered. "You fight like someone who means to live, and makes that mean something. It's different."
Eliza didn't know what to say to that, so she didn't. She had learned that silence could carry gratitude if you held it right.
"They respect you now," Shazi went on. "Not all of them. Not yet. But enough to cover the rest. Don't waste it."
"I won't," Eliza said. She felt the truth of it like an iron peg sunk into a post.
Shazi nodded, satisfied, and in the same breath: "You shouldn't let him carry you everywhere. It makes Vharan stupid."
Eliza startled, then laughed, the sound quick as a bird darting between leaves. "I'll walk, then."
"You'll walk when the path allows it," Shazi said. "Not before. Don't be a fool to make a point. We have too many fools already."
Eliza followed the line of Shazi's gaze to the treeline. Rakhal stood half-shaded, speaking in a low voice to one of the sentries. Even from here, Eliza could feel the awareness of him, a weight without pressure, a note in the air her ear found without seeking. Heat bloomed low in her belly, an instinctive response she no longer tried to deny. When his head turned, as if he'd felt her glance, she let herself meet his eyes across the distance. Something passed between them, electric and familiar, a silent acknowledgment of what had changed between them. The pull in her chest was immediate and without shame. Shazi saw it and said nothing, but the little slant of her mouth held both understanding and warning.
At dusk, the sparring circle formed again. Eliza did not join; she watched, measuring, learning the way these bodies moved in darkness, the way their breath came when they were tired, the small tells of fatigue and pride and temper. Vharan fought twice more and learned to keep his shoulders loose. He lost once and grinned with more teeth than earlier in the day. The knives sang dull songs in the ring, and none of them drew blood.
Night drew down like a lid. The camp closed its petals. Eliza cleaned her borrowed blade by the firelight, cloth working in small circles, steel reflecting flame. Her fingers found a shallow cut at the hinge of her elbow from the morning bout, a thin line she hadn't noticed when it was made. She touched it, not with pride or pain, but as a tally of her belonging: the forest, and thepeople in it, had marked her without malice. She would carry the line until the skin forgot.
What lies between us isn't always a weapon, she thought as firelight danced across her palm.Sometimes it's the boundary preventing us from taking what can't be returned. Sometimes it's simply a promise.
